Uconn

UConn's perfect ending Huskies win record 9th national title BY ROGER CLEAVELAND REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – If you chase perfection, you will catch excellence.

That motto has served UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma well through the years in motivating players to get the most out of their abilities even when the opposition didn’t always provide enough of a challenge. It’s never been a mentality about winning every game, but in striving for perfection within themselves and letting that translate into national championships.

Ultimately that approach resulted not only in excellence this season but, alas, in perfection itself. The Huskies’ 79-58 victory over Notre Dame in Tuesday night’s first national championship game between two undefeated teams earned them the fifth undefeated season in program history. Oh yeah, and an NCAA record ninth national championship.

“Of course it means something in the sense that any time we do something that has not been done before, obviously it is meaningful and rewarding, especially for (associate head coach) Chris (Dailey) and I since we have been here for all of them,” Coach Geno Auriemma said.

He said what made this one meaningful was being able to send seniors Bria Hartley and Stefanie Dolson out with the title.

“I would trade any number of championships for the way I felt when Stefanie and Bria came off the court,” Auriemma said. “I would give away, as a matter of fact, every other national championship, just to have that feeling with those two in that moment. That was pretty special.”

Hartley was touched, and couldn’t have imagined a better ending for her career.

“I am just happy that I have been able to be a part of it,” senior Bria Hartley said. “Nine national championships, that is a lot. There are a lot of teams that don’t have one. Coach Auriemma and his staff have been able to develop players and be so great consistently throughout the years. That is hard to do. I’m excited that I was able to come here and play for him. He helped me become a better player.”

Sophomore Breanna Stewart, a much more consistent player this season, ended just the way she did last year with a dominant performance that earned her Final Four Most Outstanding Player honors.

Stewart scored 21 points with nine rebounds to become only the second player in NCAA history to win MOP honors in her first two seasons. She is only the fifth overall to win it twice.

“It is a tremendous honor and stuff like that, but it is all from the help of my teammates and my coaches,” Stewart said. “I think that it is really nice to hear, but we just won the national championship. That is the best thing.”

The Huskies, who set a school record for wins in a single season by finishing 40-0, also received 18 points and seven rebounds from Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis as well as 16 points, 17 rebounds and seven assists from Stefanie Dolson. Both were on the Final Four All-Tournament team. Hartley chipped in with 13 points while Moriah Jefferson had four points, five rebounds and seven assists with only one turnover.

“I feel like everybody contributed, and that is the way we want to win a national championship,” Mosqueda-Lewis said. “I think we just felt we deserved this so much, we weren’t going to give it up. We weren’t going to let them have any confusion about who was the better team and who deserved to the national champion.”

The win sent UConn seniors Stefanie Dolson and Bria Hartley out with back-to-back national championships and a career record of 143-11 (.923).

“I said all year that I was going to leave it all out on the floor and make sure that it didn’t end in any other way than playing in the national championship game, and then winning it,” Dolson said. “I thanked the girls tonight for getting us to this point. It is such a team effort for us. This is so rewarding. It’s amazing.”

Previously tied with Tennessee for the most national titles with eight, the Huskies now stand alone atop the sport.

For that matter, Huskies’ basketball – men’s and women’s – has distinguished itself unique from the rest of the country. UConn is the only school in NCAA Division I basketball history to have won both the men’s and women’s championships in the same season, and the Huskies have now done it twice.

The UConn men beat Kentucky on Monday night, 60-54, to win their fourth national championship. Both the men and women also won national championships in 2004.

The UConn women improved to 9-0 in national championship games with Tuesday’s victory. And with the men improving to 4-0, the Huskies are an incredible 13-0 while playing for the biggest prize in basketball.

The women continued their dominance in title games in impressive fashion Tuesday night, never letting Notre Dame get into a rhythm. UConn’s defense held the Irish to 35.5 percent shooting from the field including a 4-for-15 performance from All-American Jewell Loyd.

The Irish were led by Kayla McBride with 21 points and Loyd with 13 but it wasn’t nearly enough.

The Huskies trailed just once, 8-6, a little under five minutes into the game. Then they went on a 16-0 run to take a 22-8 lead with 11:02 to play in the first half.

“The way we started offensively, we were getting everything we wanted,” Hartley said. “It felt good, because we knew all we had to do was get some stops on defense. Our defense always comes through for us, and it did again tonight.”

The Huskies’ post game also came through as they pounded the ball inside to capitalize on their size and talent advantage. By game’s end, the Huskies had outscored the Irish, 52-22, in the paint.

“We did early, we got away from it a little bit, and then they went to a triangle-and-two defense where they were only guarding Stewie and Kaleena, so as we ran those guys in different directions, everybody else was open in the lane, “ Auriemma said. “Once we got into a rhythm, that was it. We spent all year long working on a million different things, and today was a culmination of that.”

Stewart and Dolson each scored six points during the 16-0 run while Mosqueda-Lewis and Hartley each added a basket. The Huskies held the Irish scoreless for a period of 4:54 during the run. The 14-point lead produced by the run was the Huskies largest of the first half.

The Irish responded with an immediate 7-2 run to get their deficit back to single-digits. They got as close as five points, 43-38, on a Loyd 3-pointer with 27 seconds to play in the half, but the Huskies responded with a Mosqueda-Lewis putback with two seconds left to send UConn into intermission leading by seven.

“We were in the locker room at halftime, and we knew Notre Dame was not going to just fall over,” Stewart said. “They are a good team, and they are going to fight. We wanted to make sure that the way we came out in the first half was the way we came out in the second half. Once we really put our foot on the gas and really charged at them, they didn’t have an answer.”

The Huskies then scored 10 of the first 12 points of the second half to restore their lead to double-digits, 55-40, with one basket from each of the five starters. The lead never dipped below 10 again.

After a basket by McBride interrupted the Huskies’ momentum ever so briefly, they scored another eight points to open the half on an 18-4 run and push their lead to 21 points, 63-42.

Notre Dame was never in the game again. It was a humbling defeat for the Irish, who lost in the national championship for the third time in four years and still have just one national championship, won in 2001.

As Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw shook hands with Auriemma after the game, she told him she was really impressed.

“I said something like, ‘I thought we were playing the Miami Heat for a while. You guys are just that good. What a great season,’” McGraw said. “I thought they were just missing LeBron (James).”

The Irish (37-1) suffered their first loss of the season, and for the second year in a row had their season end in the Final Four with a loss to the Huskies. Last year UConn beat the Irish in the national semifinals handily, and the Huskies wanted to beat them convincingly again Tuesday night.

“We wanted to make a statement,” Hartley said. “We came out here, and we weren’t going to let anyone argue, ‘Oh Notre Dame could have won this game.’ We came out here and dominated the game the whole 40 minutes. We were hungry, and we wanted to go out there and prove without a doubt that we were the best, especially against Notre Dame. We wanted to prove that we dominated this year.”

Stewart reveled in the fact that the Huskies accomplished their mission in style.

“The fact that we won by such a big margin, it separated the two teams,” Stewart said. “The big question was, two unbeaten teams which is better? We wanted to make it a point that we are different from everyone else in the country. We have worked hard all season long since the first day of practice. We knew what our goal was, and now we got it.”

Auriemma said it was a shame that one of these teams had to lose Tuesday and have an undefeated season tarnished.

“That is also the beauty of the NCAA Tournament,” Auriemma said. “There are the absolute greatest highs that the kids and the coaching staff can ever possibly experience. But then unfortunately if you don’t win that last game, it is about as low as you will ever feel. It never goes away, no matter what. Ten years from now you will remember losing in the Final Four. It’s sickening. Sickening. Even until today. You don’t remember the wins as much.”

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